Marmots are big, furry squirrels, often found in the Colorado mountains. You might even call them fat squirrels, and the mere sight of one could make you chuckle, or go "Awww!"

You could say the same thing about a person. People are funny, too, and when you learn from Brazee that the marmots are a mirror to the self, her paintings become an occasion of self-reflection, and that's not necessarily a laughing matter.

"The marmot became a symbol of how we relate to ourselves," she said.

Local audiences can see what Brazee's paintings say about them in "Exposing the Sneaky Marmot," an exhibition that runs Saturday through May 11 at the Loveland Museum/Gallery.

Go with a sense of humor. But be ready to confront things about yourself you might not have faced before.

When looking at Brazee's paintings, it doesn't take long to understand she's after something beyond amusing her audience. One of her pictures shows a young woman in a 1950s-era bathing suit looking over her shoulder at the viewer. She's in a mountain landscape. There's not a beach anywhere in sight, and this is the first sign that we're meant to dive in psychologically. What has brought this bather to the mountains?

Like any work of art imbued with emotional depth, the painting offers several layers of interpretive possibilities, and viewers will draw their own conclusions about its meaning based on the experiences they bring to it. It's instructive to learn, though, that the woman in the image is the artist's own grandmother, and Brazee subjected her to the sneaky-marmot treatment.

"She believed that her backside was her best asset," Brazee said.

The chosen settings for these subjects are big, mountainous landscapes. This follows as much from the psychological underpinnings of the images as it does from the facts of marmot habitation.

"I think it has more to do with the idea that our inner landscapes are so huge," she said. "Vast terrain that we don't completely know."

Sometimes we think we know ourselves, but we don't — and that's often clear to those around us. It's clear to us that the man in the Brazee work, "By all appearances he had all his sneaky marmots in a row," does not have all his sneaky marmots in a row. Self-perception is always tricky and rarely trustworthy. Most viewers of this portrait will be able to relate to the subject.

Brazee is extending her marmots into other media. She makes marmot sculptures, which will people the Loveland Museum exhibition. She also has taken them commercial by co-founding a company, Rascal Riot, that sells the marmot brand in the form of gift cards and T-shirts. (You can check them out at tammibrazee.com.)

The T-shirts, like the paintings, are funny at first glance. They feature mottos such as "overthrow the marmot magnate" and "beware of marmots in disguise."

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